Individually Advised Curriculum

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Grinnell’s flexible curriculum means you’ll have significant responsibility for designing a coherent and compelling course of study—but you won’t do so alone. Your faculty adviser will be with you every step of the way, helping you select a major when the time is right during your first four semesters, and guiding you through options such as mentored research, off-campus study, teaching certification, an internship, or an interdisciplinary concentration.

Working closely with your adviser, you’ll develop a provisional four-year plan that reflects a diverse array of academic disciplines while incorporating study at the advanced level in one or more fields. The provisional plan usually requires revision, but each change will reflect your evolving sense of what it means to be liberally educated.

Your adviser may suggests areas of study that you might be inclined to avoid; often, those less-traveled avenues of inquiry are fields of knowledge or forms of intellectual discipline that will enrich and balance your chosen course of study. Remember that skills, methods of inquiry, and knowledge often transfer across disciplines. The creative application of these capabilities in new contexts may lead to new insights or solutions. Breadth of study will prepare you to approach questions not yet formulated, in fields and professions not yet imagined.